A recurring theme courses through many of 2025's blockbuster hits. This concept which extends far back to the days of the Little Tramp. In James Gunn’s *Superman*, the evil force is a greedy, heartless billionaire wielding his immense fortune to defame Earth's greatest hero while manipulating world events for his own profit. Within the dinosaur sequel *Rebirth*, the villain is a privileged biotech mogul squandering a fortune to throw the heroes into a prehistoric danger zone for personal amusement. In Disney's *Zootopia 2*, the antagonists are a family of ultra-rich lynxes who appropriated a well-meaning mother's altruistic invention and set her up for murder, all for their financial benefit.
A Legacy of Cinematic Elite Villainy
Within the dystopian thriller *The Running Man*, the antagonist embodies a wealthy villain running a TV network that makes millions by taking advantage of and killing people suffering through abject destitution, while leveraging deepfakes and a well-honed propaganda machine to portray them as avaricious, indolent, terrifying criminals. The musical *Wicked: For Good* doesn’t emphasize economic inequality as overtly, but its evil characters enjoy obvious luxury while exploiting and abusing Oz's disadvantaged inhabitants, forcing them out of jobs and toward imprisonment or servitude. The box-office champion *Ne Zha 2*, the year's top box-office hit, pits the scrappy residents of a impoverished farm town against arrogant elites who inhabit lavish sky-high mansions in the sky. Even, the lighthearted humorous remake *The Naked Gun* focuses on a billionaire's scheme to bring about global armageddon — for financial gain, needless to say.
It is not especially new in a string of movies taking it as a given that the wealthy have disproportionate control, are devoid of conscience, and a bottomless, entitled hunger for more wealth. "The wealthy are antagonists and everyday folks are heroes" as a theme stretches back to the dawn of cinema, with the Little Tramp's adventures contrasting his always poor beloved underdog against fat cats, bosses, and clueless rich men. Beginning with the Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland "Let’s put on a show" movies from that era to the 1980s dance movies that updated the exact same bit for the era of the exploitative, damaging tech-bro villain, the complete chronicle of cinema is packed with "eat the rich" stories, which assume that wealth is at odds with basic human values, and applaud the defusing, routing, and sometimes elimination of powerful, wealthy people.
The Outlet That Changes Nothing
However, somehow, we never actually eating the rich. On each occasion lawmakers respond to a new mass shooting event by faulting popular entertainment, I feel exasperated, because if people truly were that impressionable — if regular exposure to an idea via media was enough to allow it to permeate the collective psyche — undoubtedly American society would not continue to idolize billionaires. Still the news demonstrates constantly that a alarming number of Americans innately link affluence to intelligence and social worth, even after decades of cinema's biggest movies promoting a contradictory message.
Actually, it looks as though the endless parade of class-conscious storylines in American cinema has given us a safety outlet that impedes substantive reform. Given a frequent serving of predominantly uplifting fables where the hero prevails, while the billionaires are defanged and humiliated, everyone can walk away content about good conquering evil. These stories are like ethical parables, suggesting that the system works, and that resourceful individuals will root out any corrupt individuals among the generally industrious, moral, worthy wealthy who pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
A More Pointed Tone in 2025
Even though 2025's movies aren’t new in that sense, they do follow some contemporary patterns among eat-the-rich stories: They’re getting more enraged, more incisive, more targeted, and observably more violent. It’s rarely enough nowadays to see rich people learn a useful lesson in humility, like in 1941's *Sullivan's Travels*, or forfeit their fortune to the people they oppressed, like in 1983's *Trading Places*. In 2025, avaricious, malicious wealthy people were eliminated by mythological beasts (*Death of a Unicorn*) and consumed by a colossal prehistoric creature (*Jurassic World: Rebirth*). They were destroyed on a hostile planet (*Mickey 17*) and shot in the face directly on national television (*The Running Man*). They were murdered with a wine opener (*Companion*) and assaulted fatally by an up-and-coming rival (*Him*).
"Hardly any of 2025’s ultra-rich villains get the hauled off to jail conclusion, perhaps because it’s become so obvious that affluent individuals function with their own legal rules, and are highly probable to purchase their freedom."
The "behind bars" ending no longer satisfies anymore. Instead, these villains are apt to perish at the end of their movies, often in notably brutal, poetic ways.
Notable Exclusions
Some films diverge, of course. Superman's arch-nemesis in *Superman* is simply disgraced, revealed, and dispatched to prison. Evil mastermind Julian Dillinger in *Tron: Ares* winds up confined to the virtual grid, a setup that obviously being saved for a follow-up film. Korda in Wes Anderson's *The Phoenician Scheme* forfeits all his money and is transformed as a person. The antagonist family members in *Zootopia 2* are exposed as frauds and deceivers, but they don’t meet|avoid
